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I love a comment in the Reddit post where a user asks if he takes feature requests and proposes one (triple click on text to select it). The guy, shortly after,

I love a comment in the Reddit post where a user asks if he takes feature requests and proposes one (triple click on text to select it). The guy, shortly after, answers saying that it's a good idea, and that he just implemented it. I don't love it because of the attitude of the developer (which is great too), I love that it reminds me how fast it is to solo develop something and how much more complicated it gets when a team grows. (We are a small team of 15 devs in my company and it's already super complicated to be that efficient)

ggregoire 8y ago
You are also more efficient when you work on something you love.
elaus 8y ago
It only took him two hours after the feature request was posted until the change went live. I guess that kind of speed is only possible if you're a solo developer that takes full responsibility for his product and who is product owner, dev-op, UX expert and QA all in one person.
- sophistication 8y ago
  Notably he was also answering other questions in the AMA, so it possibly only took him 2 minutes. It is not a difficult feature to implement anyhow, it probably went like this: vim tools/Text.js self.addEventListener('click', function (e) { if (e.detail === 3) { self.selectAll(); } }); :wq git add tools/Text.js git commit -m "Add triple click select all" git push origin master Done.
  - mcintyre1994 8y ago
    Neat, I didn't know about detail on mouseclick events :)
  - AltruisticGap 8y ago
    The main view is a canvas. Regardless, my hunch is event delegation would be more performant.
  - IvanK_net 8y ago
    Almost ... but I use Notepad++ instead of Vim. And I had to implement the search for the first and the last character in a line according to the layout. It took me about 10 minutes :)
    - pwaivers 8y ago
      This is super interesting :). Just curious, why don't you use a more advanced code editor than Notepad++?
      - IvanK_net 8y ago
        Thanks :) I already discussed it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924664
      - umvi 8y ago
        I'm always amazed when people ship cool software with what I judge to be crappy, obsolete, or even downright dangerous processes/practices. Yet even though I (by my own judgement) use superior processes and practices (VSCode + Git + CI pipelines, etc.), I haven't shipped anything nearly as cool. A few others that come to mind are KeePass/Dwarf Fortress (no formal VCS), and GRRM (uses WordStar 4.0 in DOS)
        gammateam 8y ago
        He could have done this just as fast using GIT + CI. VSCode would have likely slowed him down with indexing, and he already knows where all his files are so there wouldn't be any gains from hopping around function declarations with the click of a mouse Although you didn't pinpoint a single process that was inferior, knowing when to break processes is part of the experience.
        softawre 8y ago
        Maybe you spend too much time on processes, getting things right, and less time on actually shipping something useful?
        8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jancsika 8y ago
  And because it's a webapp the user accesses the new feature by clicking "refresh." Compare that to building binaries for all supported platforms, testing, publishing, dripping down into Debian & Ubuntu, someone on Ubuntu-Based-Distro-#1377 reporting a dependency problem, someone old Debian complaining that their compiler is choking on a gl library under armv7l, etc.
  - analogmemory 8y ago
    In the same vein, someone says it's not working for them in WinXP IE 8
  - Nadya 8y ago
    Unless the user is using IE11. A perhaps not-so-modern but still a mainstream and typically supported browser. But if you're going to specify "old Debian" I think it would be fair to expect it to work on "old browsers" as well. But I think it would be silly to expect it to work in IE 5 anymore than some modern programs working in some old flavor of a Debian distro with outdated libraries. At some point, like people do with dated web browsers, developers need to tell users they need to update as the developer won't be supporting such outdated software anymore.
smnscu 8y ago
Can't a CI/CD pipeline + various processes be good enough to achieve a similar efficiency for under-100-engineers companies? Honest question - because I'm pretty sure I've heard some people claim similarly fast "idea to production" times.
- bigbluedots 8y ago
  Yes, but most of the time a new feature request will be in a backlog behind many other things, at least in most places I've worked
- markatkinson 8y ago
  Not so sure. One developer understands his whole code base and environment quite well. So let's say an error occurs during build it's likely he will be able to check out the logs, navigate to that area of code and troubleshoot. In a larger team the flow of info is DevOps/Developer spot error in CI/CD, find out which commit/Developer broke the build. Email/slack/ walk over to let them know and sit down for a friendly troubleshooting session. Resolve the problem. Follow necessary processes to commit change. CI/CD hosted agent is busy building other projects because not enough budget for multiple hosted agents and all CI/CD is handled in the cloud. Time to go home! Obviously that was a bit facetious but you get the picture.
- barrkel 8y ago
  Usually, feature requests go through a product manager who can do analysis, integrate with road map, prioritize against other features, figure out if there's overlap with another feature (maybe one coming up soon) and so it shouldn't actually be implemented, etc. There may be some communication between product and design to figure out how it should look and feel. Then it'll go into a sprint most probably, but not the current sprint, because that would change the scope and affect estimates and possible delivery timelines. You'd only change the sprint scope if the team is running out of work to do or there's a major customer request or other panic. There will be some measure of QA, ideally. Some people fly by the seat of their pants, and rely on fixing things in production if it breaks in production. This is using your customers as QA. Can work if you roll out gradually and are very responsive to any reports of regressions. All in all, this is unlikely to happen in less than a couple of weeks. The processes are designed for predictable, consistent delivery and to minimize surprise. Shortening the chain will mean less integrated decision making and will increase the amount of surprise and inconsistency in the product and its delivery.
thisisit 8y ago
IMHO you got it backwards. It's less of a question on efficiency than priorities. I doubt that if the request was too complicated to implement or the feature was for a very specific task (look at opening raw images in this very thread) there will be such quick response. Larger teams suffer from the fact that everyone has number of requests and prioritising one over other gets even more complicated. Even a simple request like this might have to go through a pipeline.
- sfoley 8y ago
  Classic case of confusing correlation and causation. Large teams work on large projects. Large projects have large audiences which attract large numbers of requests. The smallest change in the world is going to get lost in all that noise.
Aeolun 8y ago
I’m fairly confident that I could have built more or less the same product that our team of 30 has built over the past 5 months in the same amount of time by myself. If I’d had 1 more senior developer and a designer/front-end dev, I’m fairly certain it could be done by now. But there’s so many people involved in the process that everything slows to a crawl. I’m sure our clients love hearing that the product is developed by 30 people over 1.5 years though.
- tcbawo 8y ago
  Owning your product (ie. reaping the rewards of your labor) is an enormous motivator. It takes a skillful manager/salesperson to keep people motivated as a company grows and they have less skin in the game.
  - ekr 8y ago
    Or a fat, annually growing paycheck.
    - all2 8y ago
      Money does motivate me to an extent. Ownership really lights my fire, though. Given the opportunity to really own a thing, to take responsibility for it, is something I've been looking for in employers and potential jobs.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago
  IME it's easy to look back and focus on doing the knowns. But starting from ignorance and alone is likely to take longer than a skilled team starting from scratch. Of course it must be the right size to explore and implement the solutions without too much overhead.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    There's also a number of projects that it's super easy to do like 83% of. A couple of ambitious college students could make a basic web crawler and search engine using 2018 technology and not even that many cloud resources and get like 80% of Google's quality. But that doesn't mean they're only another long weekend from being the next Google: closing the gap really does require millions of manhours and billions of dollars of compute. (And their web crawler would be causing chaos and destruction across the web, but let he who has not accidentally deleted someone's will by crawling all the "delete this article" links cast the first stone.)
dkersten 8y ago
I follow the development of a header-only C++ library that I use and, besides a small community of users who help the author test and report bugs, its just one guy and the amount of features he's implemented in the past few months, due to him or members of the community needing the feature, is quite substantial. Its always wonderful to see substantial features or optimisations implemented shortly after seeing a discussion on it. The velocity of some of these projects is incredible. Its not necessarily just "small teams move faster". It can be, but also it depends on the passion and energy of the individuals.
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  What’s the library if I may ask?
  - dkersten 8y ago
    https://github.com/skypjack/entt https://github.com/skypjack/entt Its a great Entity-Component-System library, but better than the library itself is how active and approachable the author is.
tambourine_man 8y ago
I don't think I could work any other way without feeling miserable. The one person freelancer model is just so much fun. My only regret (and it's a big one) is that being around smart people is a great learning catalyst.
- christophilus 8y ago
  Surely there's a way to have both? Meetups or co-working spaces, maybe?
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    Yeah, I’m trying.
    - christophilus 8y ago
      I may be in the same boat as you eventually. I’d be interested in hearing your solution if you find one, and am happy to join a remote meetup if there is one.
maxxxxx 8y ago
You can be that quick with a relatively new product but once you have a few years of legacy code and a large install base then every little chance can have unexpected side effects and is much slower. It certainly helps to be a solo dev but that's not all.

ggregoire 8y ago

You are also more efficient when you work on something you love.

elaus 8y ago

It only took him two hours after the feature request was posted until the change went live. I guess that kind of speed is only possible if you're a solo developer that takes full responsibility for his product and who is product owner, dev-op, UX expert and QA all in one person.

sophistication 8y ago
Notably he was also answering other questions in the AMA, so it possibly only took him 2 minutes. It is not a difficult feature to implement anyhow, it probably went like this: vim tools/Text.js self.addEventListener('click', function (e) { if (e.detail === 3) { self.selectAll(); } }); :wq git add tools/Text.js git commit -m "Add triple click select all" git push origin master Done.
- mcintyre1994 8y ago
  Neat, I didn't know about detail on mouseclick events :)
- AltruisticGap 8y ago
  The main view is a canvas. Regardless, my hunch is event delegation would be more performant.
- IvanK_net 8y ago
  Almost ... but I use Notepad++ instead of Vim. And I had to implement the search for the first and the last character in a line according to the layout. It took me about 10 minutes :)
  - pwaivers 8y ago
    This is super interesting :). Just curious, why don't you use a more advanced code editor than Notepad++?
    - IvanK_net 8y ago
      Thanks :) I already discussed it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924664
    - umvi 8y ago
      I'm always amazed when people ship cool software with what I judge to be crappy, obsolete, or even downright dangerous processes/practices. Yet even though I (by my own judgement) use superior processes and practices (VSCode + Git + CI pipelines, etc.), I haven't shipped anything nearly as cool. A few others that come to mind are KeePass/Dwarf Fortress (no formal VCS), and GRRM (uses WordStar 4.0 in DOS)
      - gammateam 8y ago
        He could have done this just as fast using GIT + CI. VSCode would have likely slowed him down with indexing, and he already knows where all his files are so there wouldn't be any gains from hopping around function declarations with the click of a mouse Although you didn't pinpoint a single process that was inferior, knowing when to break processes is part of the experience.
      - softawre 8y ago
        Maybe you spend too much time on processes, getting things right, and less time on actually shipping something useful?
      - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 8y ago
And because it's a webapp the user accesses the new feature by clicking "refresh." Compare that to building binaries for all supported platforms, testing, publishing, dripping down into Debian & Ubuntu, someone on Ubuntu-Based-Distro-#1377 reporting a dependency problem, someone old Debian complaining that their compiler is choking on a gl library under armv7l, etc.
- analogmemory 8y ago
  In the same vein, someone says it's not working for them in WinXP IE 8
- Nadya 8y ago
  Unless the user is using IE11. A perhaps not-so-modern but still a mainstream and typically supported browser. But if you're going to specify "old Debian" I think it would be fair to expect it to work on "old browsers" as well. But I think it would be silly to expect it to work in IE 5 anymore than some modern programs working in some old flavor of a Debian distro with outdated libraries. At some point, like people do with dated web browsers, developers need to tell users they need to update as the developer won't be supporting such outdated software anymore.

smnscu 8y ago

Can't a CI/CD pipeline + various processes be good enough to achieve a similar efficiency for under-100-engineers companies? Honest question - because I'm pretty sure I've heard some people claim similarly fast "idea to production" times.

bigbluedots 8y ago
Yes, but most of the time a new feature request will be in a backlog behind many other things, at least in most places I've worked
markatkinson 8y ago
Not so sure. One developer understands his whole code base and environment quite well. So let's say an error occurs during build it's likely he will be able to check out the logs, navigate to that area of code and troubleshoot. In a larger team the flow of info is DevOps/Developer spot error in CI/CD, find out which commit/Developer broke the build. Email/slack/ walk over to let them know and sit down for a friendly troubleshooting session. Resolve the problem. Follow necessary processes to commit change. CI/CD hosted agent is busy building other projects because not enough budget for multiple hosted agents and all CI/CD is handled in the cloud. Time to go home! Obviously that was a bit facetious but you get the picture.
barrkel 8y ago
Usually, feature requests go through a product manager who can do analysis, integrate with road map, prioritize against other features, figure out if there's overlap with another feature (maybe one coming up soon) and so it shouldn't actually be implemented, etc. There may be some communication between product and design to figure out how it should look and feel. Then it'll go into a sprint most probably, but not the current sprint, because that would change the scope and affect estimates and possible delivery timelines. You'd only change the sprint scope if the team is running out of work to do or there's a major customer request or other panic. There will be some measure of QA, ideally. Some people fly by the seat of their pants, and rely on fixing things in production if it breaks in production. This is using your customers as QA. Can work if you roll out gradually and are very responsive to any reports of regressions. All in all, this is unlikely to happen in less than a couple of weeks. The processes are designed for predictable, consistent delivery and to minimize surprise. Shortening the chain will mean less integrated decision making and will increase the amount of surprise and inconsistency in the product and its delivery.

thisisit 8y ago

IMHO you got it backwards. It's less of a question on efficiency than priorities. I doubt that if the request was too complicated to implement or the feature was for a very specific task (look at opening raw images in this very thread) there will be such quick response. Larger teams suffer from the fact that everyone has number of requests and prioritising one over other gets even more complicated. Even a simple request like this might have to go through a pipeline.

sfoley 8y ago
Classic case of confusing correlation and causation. Large teams work on large projects. Large projects have large audiences which attract large numbers of requests. The smallest change in the world is going to get lost in all that noise.

Aeolun 8y ago

I’m fairly confident that I could have built more or less the same product that our team of 30 has built over the past 5 months in the same amount of time by myself. If I’d had 1 more senior developer and a designer/front-end dev, I’m fairly certain it could be done by now. But there’s so many people involved in the process that everything slows to a crawl. I’m sure our clients love hearing that the product is developed by 30 people over 1.5 years though.

tcbawo 8y ago
Owning your product (ie. reaping the rewards of your labor) is an enormous motivator. It takes a skillful manager/salesperson to keep people motivated as a company grows and they have less skin in the game.
- ekr 8y ago
  Or a fat, annually growing paycheck.
  - all2 8y ago
    Money does motivate me to an extent. Ownership really lights my fire, though. Given the opportunity to really own a thing, to take responsibility for it, is something I've been looking for in employers and potential jobs.
paulryanrogers 8y ago
IME it's easy to look back and focus on doing the knowns. But starting from ignorance and alone is likely to take longer than a skilled team starting from scratch. Of course it must be the right size to explore and implement the solutions without too much overhead.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  There's also a number of projects that it's super easy to do like 83% of. A couple of ambitious college students could make a basic web crawler and search engine using 2018 technology and not even that many cloud resources and get like 80% of Google's quality. But that doesn't mean they're only another long weekend from being the next Google: closing the gap really does require millions of manhours and billions of dollars of compute. (And their web crawler would be causing chaos and destruction across the web, but let he who has not accidentally deleted someone's will by crawling all the "delete this article" links cast the first stone.)

dkersten 8y ago

I follow the development of a header-only C++ library that I use and, besides a small community of users who help the author test and report bugs, its just one guy and the amount of features he's implemented in the past few months, due to him or members of the community needing the feature, is quite substantial. Its always wonderful to see substantial features or optimisations implemented shortly after seeing a discussion on it. The velocity of some of these projects is incredible. Its not necessarily just "small teams move faster". It can be, but also it depends on the passion and energy of the individuals.

adamnemecek 8y ago
What’s the library if I may ask?
- dkersten 8y ago
  https://github.com/skypjack/entt https://github.com/skypjack/entt Its a great Entity-Component-System library, but better than the library itself is how active and approachable the author is.

tambourine_man 8y ago

I don't think I could work any other way without feeling miserable. The one person freelancer model is just so much fun. My only regret (and it's a big one) is that being around smart people is a great learning catalyst.

christophilus 8y ago
Surely there's a way to have both? Meetups or co-working spaces, maybe?
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  Yeah, I’m trying.
  - christophilus 8y ago
    I may be in the same boat as you eventually. I’d be interested in hearing your solution if you find one, and am happy to join a remote meetup if there is one.

maxxxxx 8y ago

You can be that quick with a relatively new product but once you have a few years of legacy code and a large install base then every little chance can have unexpected side effects and is much slower. It certainly helps to be a solo dev but that's not all.